


Reclaim Your Scattered Pieces

by MadSeason (naive_wanderer)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bisexual Zuko (Avatar), Brief suicidal ideation, F/M, Gen, Happy Ending, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, M/M, References to Depression, mostly canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25341475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naive_wanderer/pseuds/MadSeason
Summary: [When Zuko is sixteen, he takes a false name and becomes a refugee. Lots of other things happen when he is sixteen, as well, but one of them is becoming a refugee. He develops a hunger that won’t abate. His anger fizzles out and leaves something like ashes under his skin.]Or, six times Zuko is kissed, and one time he isn't.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Jet/Zuko (Avatar), Jin/Zuko (Avatar), Mai/Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko, Ursa & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 290





	Reclaim Your Scattered Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot believe I had to become a whole adult before seeing Avatar. Anyway, Zuko is my child.

.

**1.**

Zuko’s mother wraps him in a warm embrace one night when he is ten, and kisses his forehead, and in the morning she is gone. No one will tell him where she went, no matter how many times he asks, so he stops asking.

Zuko’s mother was always gentle with him. No one touches him like that again for a very long time.

**2.**

Zuko isn’t conscious for it, but when he is thirteen, the morning that he’s to be taken from the Fire Nation for exile, his sister Azula impulsively leans over him on the infirmary cot and presses a kiss to the bandage covering the left side of his face.

Even she isn’t sure why. She laughs when they carry him out.

**3.**

When Zuko is sixteen, he takes a false name and becomes a refugee. Lots of other things happen when he is sixteen, as well, but one of them is becoming a refugee. He develops a hunger that won’t abate. His anger fizzles out and leaves something like ashes under his skin.

He and his uncle meet people; they get on a ferry to Ba Sing Se and Zuko meets more. After they’ve liberated the food and most of the passengers are settled down for sleep, the boy named Jet pulls Zuko aside, leads him to what looks like a utility closet, and kisses him on the mouth.

Zuko is so taken off guard that he doesn’t do anything for a few seconds, just stands there in the dark with another boy’s lips on his and tries to process, and when his brain catches up with him he gets his hands up between them and pushes himself away. He doesn’t have to push very hard—Jet backs off easily and then it’s just the two of them standing in a stuffy, dark utility closet. There are piles of rope on the floor. Zuko’s breathing is loud.

That his own first reaction wasn’t indignant fury doesn’t surprise Zuko, for a variety of reasons. He doesn’t let himself follow up the thought.

He is so tired.

“No?” Jet asks, with one eyebrow raised, and though his hands are still wrapped loosely around Zuko’s upper arms, he doesn’t make another move. “Did I read this whole thing wrong?” 

Zuko wets his lips, considering. He can’t seem to take his eyes off this guy’s mouth, suddenly. None of this had remotely occurred to him twenty seconds ago. And yet—

He’d felt something, just now. Zuko has, recently, been hollowed out and numbed, like someone’s taken a melon baller to his insides and left them out somewhere to rot. Now, he’s got a curl of anticipation in his belly.

It might be mortifying, but it’s dark in here, and no one else can see them.

“Li?” Jet prompts.

“I’ve just never...” Zuko finds himself saying. It’s not a no.

Jet grins. “I figured,” he says, which might have gotten Zuko riled up if he wasn’t currently so dazed. “I could teach you. I don’t mind.”

Sparks fly down Zuko’s spine. He doesn’t know this guy, really. Jet doesn’t know him.

“Okay,” Zuko says, not giving himself time to think. He doesn’t want to think.

It’s more deliberate, this time. Jet moves Zuko’s hands to his hips, slides his own hands up Zuko’s chest, and backs him up against the wall of the closet. He leans in.

Zuko lets his eyes fall closed. He doesn’t have to do much except pay attention to the physical sensations, hands on his body, lips on his lips. His mouth doesn’t know what to do right away but it’s not hard to copy what he’s being shown, to pick up a rhythm.

It’s nice.

When he returns to the deck, visibly ruffled, Uncle’s awake. He raises his eyebrows at Zuko, but doesn’t say anything, thank Agni.

Later, much later, when Zuko is gripping his dao and Jet is being dragged away in an alley with genuine rage in his eyes, Zuko resists the urge to touch his own face and feels something in his chest ache, like an old wound.

**4.**

Jin is a cute girl that Zuko doesn’t really know. She asks him out and she kisses him under the light of the lamps, even though he made a fool of himself with that _stupid_ coupon—thanks a lot, Uncle—and he wants very badly to kiss her back. He starts to, because tonight he feels like a human being in a way he never realized he _didn’t_ , before, but—

He tries, but he can’t. Jin likes Li, the teashop boy. She doesn’t like Zuko. She likely wouldn’t like him, if she knew who he was. After everything he’s done, after his many failures, _this_ is what feels too dishonest for Zuko to handle.

He goes back to the apartment and he hides away in the bedroom and he doesn’t brood, exactly. He’s not angry, and he doesn’t hurt. He feels... something, but angry and hurt are the only things he’s been intimately familiar with for so long that he can’t quite place whatever it is.

He’d lit the lamps and he’d made Jin smile. She doesn’t know him, but he'd made her smile. He did that.

**5.**

Beneath a lake in Ba Sing Se, Zuko makes a decision. He makes a decision, and fear grips him like a vise, fear like he hasn’t felt in a very long time, and he walks back to their apartment feeling out-of-his-body the entire way.

He faints when he gets there. He’s never done that before.

A sickness of the soul, Uncle says, some indeterminate time later when the sun is up. Zuko doesn’t think he’s ever felt this bad in his life, with one notable exception. If this is a sickness of the soul, then Zuko’s soul is in worse shape than he thought. He’s not sure what to make of it.

On the third night Zuko stops asking for water, or complaining of the cold. His breath comes in shallow. He does not know that it’s the third night; he only knows that his brain skips forward in time to the moment he is staring blankly towards the doorway of their apartment from the futon, moonlight casting a perfect bright square of white on the floor from the window. 

The world nearly lost the moon entirely. A bunch of people Zuko knew died, that night. His mother, years ago, she probably died. Lu Ten definitely died, far away where Zuko didn’t see but so close to where Zuko is right now. He’s catching up with the rest of the world in the number of his losses.

He is so bone-tired. He’s not sure he’s ever really gotten anyone to understand how much.

It’s not the first time Zuko has considered giving up, but it might be the first time the universe has presented it to him as a real option. “I should go,” he murmurs to the door, the words coming to him unbidden.

He’s not lucid, not really, can’t truly grasp what he’s saying, but he can kind of feel his uncle shake on his other side, can kind of feel the hand gripping his past the point of comfort.

“Oh, my child, please don’t,” Uncle says, kissing his palm. Zuko has never heard him this upset. The words float over Zuko’s head like a cloud. “Please don’t.”

Zuko doesn’t, in the end. He doesn’t even remember saying it. He wakes up the next afternoon and gags weakly on the floor, nothing coming up but bile, and soon after that his fever breaks. He sits up and gulps down a tasteless broth his uncle gives him like his life depends on it, and afterwards feels, for the first time in his life, whatever it is to not be hollow.

Maybe it’s whole.

**6.**

When Zuko is over halfway to seventeen and underground again in Ba Sing Se, he makes another decision. He watches a child fall. Fear grips him like a vise.

He doesn’t get sick, this time, but afterwards his fury returns to him, full-force. He almost missed it, this hot familiarity, the only friend he has.

He’s home, is the thing. He’s home, and it feels good. It doesn’t feel good. Azula isn’t as cruel to Zuko as he knows she could be. Azula killed the Avatar, and it was the right thing to do. Zuko helped her, and it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t the right thing to do. Azula killed a child.

He’s home and he’s the crown prince once again and he wears fine silks and does his hair up in a topknot even though it’s barely long enough to fit, even though he cut it off a few short months ago, even though his uncle is rotting in a cell underneath the palace and Zuko put him there. Zuko didn’t put him there, Iroh put himself there. But really, it was Zuko. 

Zuko doesn’t know what he’s supposed to believe. His uncle won’t talk to him.

He’s home and nobody ever mentions that nearly half his face has been disfigured.

Mai does, actually. He takes her out walking after a private lunch on a traitorously beautiful day and she asks if he can see out of his left eye. Zuko waits for anger to rise in him at the question, but it never does, so he answers honestly.

“It must have taken a lot of work to compensate for that,” Mai remarks. She’s got one arm looped through his at the elbow. “You used to prefer your left side when you practiced.”

Zuko’s heart thumps. “You noticed that?”

“Of course I did, Zuko,” Mai says, like he’s an idiot, and she turns to look at him properly. She doesn’t blush, because she’s had too many years of practice carefully schooling her expressions, but she tilts her head, just a little. Zuko wonders what on earth else she noticed.

“Can I kiss you?” Mai asks, and Zuko’s mouth goes dry.

“Why are you asking?” he manages. “We’re on a date.”

“Because it’s polite?” Mai says, a little snottily, and the corners of her mouth twitch up. Zuko’s do the same. “Is that a yes, or a no?”

Since he came home, Mai is the only person who’s modified any of her behavior at all to account for how Zuko’s changed. She never approaches from his left side when she can help it, because his hearing is very good but her movements are naturally very quiet. She never touches him without making sure it’s welcome.

“Sure,” Zuko says. It comes out hoarse.

Mai raises a single eyebrow. “‘Sure’, or yes?”

Zuko considers. Mai is strikingly pretty in the high afternoon light, her hair black and glossy and her eyes darkly amused. She’s grown tall. He’s kissed her before, a few times, but never in such a deliberate way. He wants to do it again. He wonders if she _knows_ how difficult it is for him to make these kinds of moves, how paralyzed he feels. How his body still hasn’t one-hundred-percent learned the difference between excitement and terror.

At another time, he might have bristled at her tone. Today, he says, “Yeah. Yes,” and Mai leans in with an endearing swiftness, like she’s been holding herself back from it. She goes up on her toes a bit, even though Zuko’s not tall enough yet for her to need to.

It’s soft. Sparks fly down Zuko’s spine. His mind, roiling and restless since his return, goes blank.

When Mai pulls away, she’s holding one of his hands. She smiles.

“You’re pretty,” Zuko blurts. He knows he sounds awkward as hell, but it’s kind of worth it for how Mai purses her lips like she’s trying to keep a frogsquirrel from leaping out of her mouth. 

“So are you,” she says, and her voice is a little hoarse too, suddenly, like his. It is not, strangely enough, the first time someone has said something like that to Zuko, but it’s the first time he believes it.

Later, much later, when Mai has made her own vital choice to help him, when Zuko is standing on a prison gondola watching her silhouette fade in the distance, his heart twists so hard it almost knocks the wind out of him. He wants to hang onto the feeling as long as he can.

**\+ 1**

Zuko joins the Avatar and goes on a few field trips and watches an awful play, and on a nondescript evening on Ember Island close to what will probably be the most important day of all of their lives so far, he sits in the sand and tries to count his breaths.

He holds a flame in hands. The colors shift, orange and yellow and pink and blue. He hasn’t shown anyone else yet. This is the only way he can get it to happen, so far—alone, when he’s calm, when he can focus on the bright hues dancing in his hands with both his good and bad eyes, safe enough to feel something other than disgust. He sees something beautiful, that he made.

He lets the flame putter out when he hears Toph approaching behind him. She goes out of her way to announce her presence around him now, which he’s only recently understanding might have something to do with her sense of humor as much as self-preservation. He’s never been fast on the uptake with those sorts of things.

“What are you moping about?” Toph asks, loudly, once she’s near enough.

“I’m not moping,” Zuko insists, because he isn’t, really. He feels stable and filled up in ways he hasn’t been for a very long time—maybe not ever. He suspects, underneath the generalized sense of restlessness, that he’s happy.

It’s a little bit scary.

“So you’re just out here alone on the beach for the aesthetic?”

Zuko frowns. “I’m telling the truth. Can’t you tell when I’m lying?”

“Yeah,” Toph says, taking a seat beside him. “You’re really bad at it, by the way. But you also seem to think you’re doing something wrong when you tell the truth, you lunatic. Your heartbeat goes all over the place right after you do it.”

Zuko opens his mouth; closes it. Toph can’t actually know what he’s thinking—she’s obscenely observant but there’s also a healthy dose of bluffing, there—but she’s right about this.

“I guess I don’t always trust myself,” he admits at length, letting it wash over him like the evening light. “I’m trying to.”

He is. He’d genuinely upset Aang earlier today because of a careless remark, and after some embarrassed blustering he’d apologized for it. He’d been forgiven, too, but he still feels ashamed. He’s been trying to let it go. He’d promised himself he would stop wallowing in every mistake and move forward, and it’s a choice he has to make for himself, every day. Sometimes many times a day.

Toph shifts her weight on the ground. Her hands curl in the sand; she digs one foot further in and a castle springs forth a meter or so away. She’s getting better with sand.

“Do you wanna tell me why?” Toph says. “I can’t promise I won’t tell you you’re being ridiculous, but I promise I’ll listen.”

Zuko thinks, Toph is twelve. She’s tough and strong and smart and no one can tell her what to do, but she’s still a twelve-year-old kid. Younger than his sister is now. Younger than he was when the Agni Kai happened.

_It was wrong_ , Zuko reminds himself. He’s trying to be patient about this, too, this need to repeat it to himself over and over at any given moment, like a mantra. It was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong.

It’s a thing that happened to him. A lot of things have happened to him. They’re not who he is.

“I’ll tell you all sometime,” Zuko says, surprising himself. “Not right now.”

“Okay,” Toph says, just like that. Accepting. She moves her other foot and the sandcastle crumbles away.

Zuko thinks, these people don’t pity him. They know who he is, they actually _know_ , and they know what he’s done. He’s _earned_ their friendship. Zuko hasn’t successfully earned anything in his life, before now.

“Come on back to the house, Sparky,” Toph says, getting to her feet and dusting off her pants. “Everyone’s been complaining that they want tea, and you’re the _only_ one who makes it properly. None of these chuckleheads ever drank tea before you came around. You’re spoiling them, I swear.”

She holds out a hand. Zuko doesn’t need it, but he reaches out and lets her help him up all the same.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hit me up on tumblr, @madseason.


End file.
